WAVE your arms in the right way, and a drone taxiing along a runway will stop, turn and find a parking spot.
Drones can already land autonomously on aircraft-carrier decks, but humans control them during taxiing. With piloted aircraft, navy flight-deck marshals use a codified set of hand gestures to instruct pilots to, for instance, cut their engines, open weapon bay doors or move to a refuelling bay.
To test whether these gestures could be recognised by a computer, Yale Song of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues wrote an algorithm that analyses 3-second clips from a depth-sensing…
